[vtkusers] Need Help

[Mathieu Malaterre]

Davood Ansari wrote:
> Hi Every Body
>  
> I am doing my PhD research in the area of application of Finite Element  
> Method
> to special microwave problems at National University of Singapore.
>  
> Recently I spent a lot of time on generating some purpose specific FEM 
> mesh and
>  now I need a good tool for visualizing my mesh (and later the 
> computational results).
> I am pretty new to vtk but I think it seems to serve the purpose. Now my 
> question is as follows:
>  
> 1.Is it easy to use vtk to visualize FEM mesh. Generally this is about 
> drawing lines,
> polygons and polyhedrons in 2D and 3D space?

Are all your elements linear ? VTK support the following elements:

http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkCell.html

For 3D:

http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkCell3D.html

And a couple of quadratic elements:

http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkNonLinearCell.html

> 2.Does vtk provide the tools for drawing such simple geometric objects?

Yes.

> 3.Do you think I am aiming at the right tool if vtk is the choice? 

Yes :)

> 4. are there any examples like that ?

If your mesh is simply a PolyData, then you only need to render the 
polydata. If your mesh is composed of 3d elements, you may want to use 
vtkShrinkFilter.

You should read VTK/Examples/Tutorial/Step1/Cxx/Cone.cxx for an example 
on how to use a vtkPolyDataMapper for instance.

> 5. can I use vtk as a library for c/c++ in Linux and call vtk routines 
> from my c/c++ codes?

You can call VTK from:
- C++
- Tcl
- Python
- Java


HTH
Mathieu